One of the things I like best about PucaTrade is how easily I can mine my collection for value. I’ve been playing a long time, and while I have more valuable things to send out, there’s not much that feels better than sending out a stack of commons for full value. Some of these buylist for decent money, but I really like getting bonuses for the simple effort of rifling through old draft chaff.
So I’m going to get through Scars of Mirrodin block today, and there’s some surprising stuff in there. If you find it relaxing to sort through a thousand-count box and pluck out twenty bucks in value, this is how to get that feeling.
A reminder that these are not the most valuable cards from their expansions. These are the ones higher on the want list, so these are the ones that will not linger long on your have list. Find them, send them, and profit.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
This really is too easy sometimes. Commander 2016 is available in stores and people have started to buy it in earnest. Now that players have the physical cards that come in the precons, now and only now they are starting to buy the cards that aren’t in the precons that they want for their decks. They didn’t buy them when spoilers began to trickle in and they knew Deepglow Skate was broken. They didn’t buy them when Atraxa was spoiled and they knew they were going to build some durdly planeswalker deck. They didn’t buy them when the list of the Atraxa deck was fully spoiled and they knew which cards weren’t going to be included in any of the Commander 2016 precons. They didn’t buy the cards during the two week period where everything was fully spoiled when they and everyone else was making their theoretical builds and submitting them to Tappedout so EDHREC could build their databases with everyone’s builds and tip off financiers to which cards were important. No, they waited until they had the Atraxa deck in hand, tore it open, spread the cards out – only then did they look online and exclaim “Oh my stars, look how much Doubling Season costs!” You had like a month to get The Chain Veil and only now is it spiking. The same goes for Krark-Clan Ironworks, Time Sieve and a dozen other cards we identified in this series before they went up.
I don’t think cards are done going up, either. While Atraxa and Breya are making stuff spike, I think Yidris and Kynaois/Tiro aren’t done. In fact, in the case of the latter two decks, I don’t think the cards have really started despite there being a relatively similar amount of decks registered on EDHREC. There aren’t the sexy targets like we had in Breya and Atraxa, but I still think there are cards worth talking about. So let’s talk about what Kynaois and Tiro are going to do for us.
Group Hug is an odd approach to the game. Gaining other people life, drawing them cards and developing their mana in the hopes that they will leave you alone can usually work pretty well but when it comes time to close the game out, you may find yourself in some trouble. You may use the approach to try and help the second-strongest player kill the strongest one and then try and mop up, or you may try and play for second place. You may also just play a deck where you have a lot of symmetrical effects like Mana Flare but you take advantage of them more than the other players because you are set up to win before they do. Maybe you make everyone think you’re helping them with the extra cards they’re drawing until you deck them. What I do know is that you need to protect yourself and cards that do that are always going to be winners.
There is decent reprint risk here, I think, but I don’t really know when and where. What I do know is that this has quietly doubled over the last few years and while flashier cards that are played outside of EDH like Ghostly Prison are getting all of the attention, this card makes them pay 4 mana to attack with their creatures in the Kynaios deck and that’s two Ghostly Prisons by my count. Even at $5 I like the buy-in on this card. It’s from Invasion, a set where there are plenty of $5 uncommons. A playable rare seems pretty reasonable at $5 by comparison. Aura Shards is $8 after a commander set reprint and is uncommon from the same set. Aura Shards is also in 5 times as many EDH decks as Restraint, but I think with commander sets giving us commanders that encourage us to build enchantment cocoons, I think the gap could close. At 3 times as rare you also mitigate that demand gap a bit. I think $8 is reasonable for Restraint and if you find these under $5, I think it’s a good buy. This pairs very nicely with this deck and its strategy and also with 5 color decks. It’s almost always going to be better than Propaganda, but even if it were just a functional reprint of that card, scarcity could give it upside – look at the P3K cards that get played in EDH because they’re spare copies of staples.
This has been flat for a minute, but perhaps there has never been a commander that let you take advantage of this card better. Since you’re drawing all sorts of extra cards, it’s negligible to skip your draw step and you never have to worry about coming up with cards to pitch to the cost to keep this shield up. There is very low supply online and the price has been flat for so long it’s unlikely to get a reprint for price reasons and it’s a bit pernicious to include in a precon. With limited reprint prospects, dwindling supply and a potential spike in demand, this seems primed to make some moves. Since it has hovered in the $4 to $5 range, the odds of this being hidden in dollar boxes seems low so it’s unlikely that a wave of discovered supply will mitigate a price increase predicated on copies disappearing from retail outlets. This protects you very well and with the extra cards you draw at your end step helping you keep this around indefinitely, especially if you’re further drawing with cards like Consecrated Sphinx. This may be a nonbo if you’re trying to deck yourself and win with this next card, but it’s certainly good at making sure you stay alive.
I like this about as much as I can for someone who liked this more at $2. My enthusiasm hasn’t been dampened but I won’t pretend we weren’t better off getting these at $2. Then again, I used to pull these out of bulk, so it feels good to think about this card going to $10. This card is a great way to win the game and we have already called this cheaper than it is now so we were able to make some money off of it. Can we continue to make money even if we have no copies and are buying in now for the first time? I think so. Innistrad boxes are hella expensive and this seems tricky to reprint outside of supplementary product. I think the odds are good that we have ally-color decks for Commander 2017 so if this isn’t in the Dimir deck, I expect this to spike hard then. I also think this will grow a bit before the start of C17 spoilers. I am betting money this doesn’t get reprinted, are you? The buy-in price isn’t bad right now if you are.
The purpose of mentioning cards I have already mentioned is severalfold. First, I want to remind you that we liked these cards in the past and they have gone up. Secondly, I want to call attention to the fact that we had a reason before to think these cards would go up and now we have another reason. That makes me think they will go up even more. Annex is in the same class as Collective Restraint. Tricky to reprint, this is also specifically references planeswalkers and is more likely to force them to pay life the more aggressive their deck is (and therefore less likely to have access to white mana). We talked about this card earlier, but for a different reason and now we’re talking about it again. Seems like a winner to me.
Between Leovold and Kynaios, demand for this card isn’t going down anytime soon. It’s a tad on the expensive side, but as a conflux rare, there is room for growth. It’s been enough time that copies are starting to dry up and with nothing to replace them, this card is going to grow sharply if it shakes off its current inertia. Lots of mine effects went up due to Nekusar and new demand means they could continue to grow. I am pretty enthusiastic about this one in particular, especially with how many times Temple Bell and Howling Mine have been printed.
This oddly benefits from being worse than Rites of Flourishing. While Rites is on its third printing, Heartbeat has been mostly left alone to grow quietly. You’re likely to play both, especially in a redless deck with no access to cards like Mana Flare and Zhur-Taa Ancient. However, of all the new decks in the last few years, Kynaios is the most likely to want this card. Casual, 60-card players use this card a non-zero amount. I worry about this going up so quietly that copies may be squirreled away, but I feel like casuals are demanding this and ferreting out secret copies and a demand increase will likely directly correlate to an increase in price.
Whereas high-demand commanders are already spiking prices, I think there is still opportunity for the cards here. Lower-demand commanders will still nonetheless get built. People haven’t even opened the decks they’re getting as Christmas presents. There is time to get in on a lot of these cards.
One thing I caution is to not be impatient. Don’t invest money in EDH cards unless you can afford to wait a while. I recommend buying stuff to play your other formats and trying to trade it into EDH cards before they drop in price due to rotation or whatever. EDH cards hold their value longer because they are non-cyclical. Trading a Smuggler’s Copter that will be a bulk rare when it rotates into a whole big stack of Panharmonicons and Ghitapur Orrererys is going to make you feel like a genius in a year or two, and your trade partner will be happy to do it, too. If this stuff doesn’t go up immediately, DON’T PANIC. How long have people been holding onto The Chain Veil? We knew it would spike eventually and this week it finally did. It took a while, and if you bought them back when I first said it would be a $5 card soon and got impatient when they weren’t $5 within 6 months and sold out, you’re kicking yourself this week. If you took the last year to accumulate copies through trading, cheap eBay lots, SCG sales and Puca Trade, you’re happy this week. Font of Mythos may take a year or two to go up. It may take another card like Leovold getting printed to finally break its stalemate and head upward in price. The point is that we all know it can do it. If you don’t want real money tied up, find other ways to accumulate copies of EDH cards you want as specs. The whole reason we’re buying EDH cards is they go up slowly, predictably and inevitably, they’re easy to identify, easy to move and we can play with them while we wait them to go up. Patience was rewarded this week as cards like The Chain Veil finally moved and patience will be rewarded again. We called Anvil of Bogardan when Nekusar came out and it took Leovold to make it go up. Concepts are used and reused and commanders will come out in the next year or two that will create additional demand for cards that aren’t growing right now. Just remember that cards that let us cheat are always good and we’ll all make some money. If you’ll excuse me, I have to buylist a pile of Time Sieves. Until next week.
Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy. And watch this YouTube channel to keep up to date with Cartel Aristocrats, a fun and informative webcast with several other finance personalities!
After last weekend’s dearth of meaningful events, this weekend brought a deluge: GP Denver, GP Madrid, and the SCG Invitational. That’s three Standard events and a Modern event to look across. The story of the weekend was certainly Aetherworks Marvel, but there’s some other exciting stuff going on beneath that as well, which is welcome news, since Standard has been looking grim lately.
Aetherworks Marvel
Price Last Week: $4 Price Today: $7.50 Possible Price: $20
I didn’t want to talk about the same card two weeks in a row. My goal was to look a little further out toward the horizon most weeks, and it’s hard to call this on the horizon any longer. Yet after such an explosive weekend, I don’t see how I can choose to ignore Marvel.
Two decks in the top 8 of Denver were Marvel, including second place. Four decks in the top 8 of Madrid, including the win. Five in the top 8 of the SCG Invitational, including the win. Yes, I’d say Aetherworks Marvel had a, well, marvelous weekend.
When we looked at Marvel last week the price was hovering around $4. It was still in that range Saturday afternoon, but by Sunday, the TCG low was up to $6. Upon waking up Monday morning, it was $7.50 to $8. I expect a great deal of that movement is players picking up copies for their own decks, rather than speculators gobbling up the low end, but I can’t be sure.
We’re probably past the buy-in point at this point, as you’d need to hit the absolute best case scenario in order to make it worth your while. If this doesn’t hit at least $15, paying $7 to $8+ is a negative value proposition. Whether it can climb that high is a function of what support Aether Revolt brings, what tools that set brings GB Delirium and UW Flash, and how stable the deck’s position in the metagame is. My expectation is that the most likely result is that between now and April it peaks around $11 to $12, though I’m pegging that outcome around 50%.
Prized Amalgam
Price Last Week: $3 Price Today: $3 Possible Price: $9
What started life as a “oh I wonder if Dredge will play that” type of card has become a sacred cow of a tier one Modern deck, and is also a star in more than one Standard strategy. Amalgam made top 8 of Denver in a UR Zombie Emerge list that never plans on hard casting it, and we saw it in the top 8 of Madrid in BR Zombies list that, amusingly enough, also never planned on hard casting the medium-sized engine that could.
As a staple in a single Modern deck and nothing more, $2 to $3 was a reasonable priced for Amalgam. If we begin to see it take firm hold in Standard, though, prices will react accordingly. Standard is always the biggest driver of rares, and without that demand, it’s unlikely that other constructed formats will push anything recent too high. Add in that Standard demand though, and you’ve now got the largest competitive format pushing a card’s price, while Modern is helping pull from the other side.
All things considered, double digits would be a real stretch for Amalgam. It’s not the only rare in the decks we see it in, in any format. That there are other reasonably valuable cards flanking Amalgam in each deck list means that it doesn’t get to be the star of the show as far as price tags go. Still, we could certainly see him climb into the high single digits as a key piece in multiple strategies across multiple formats.
Panharmonicon
Price Last Week: $3.50 Price Today: $3.50 Possible Price: $10
This is one that I’m sure some number of readers are thrilled to see, and another group are upset about. On the one hand, it’s great that Panharmonicon, a certified Cool Card, is Standard-relevant enough to show up here. On the other hand, if you’re a savvy EDH investor and have been waiting for your chance to vacuum up cheap copies, this is far more attention than you’d like the card to garner.
Seth Manfield made the top 8 of Denver playing UW Panharmonicon, and a buddy playing the same thing wasn’t far behind. The strategy played some familiar Standard faces in the way of Reflector Mage, Eldrazi Displacer, and Smuggler’s Copter, but it also runs the much more exciting Skysovereign, Consul Flagship and, much to LSV’s delight, a full set of Cloudblazer. What madman wouldn’t enjoy playing this?
I especially like that there’s ironically not a lot of value in this deck right now, all things considered. It consists mostly of commons and uncommons, with nearly every other rare in the deck mentioned above. That sets up Panharmonicon (and Skysovereign, to a slightly lesser extent) to enjoy the spotlight moreso than if this was packed with mythics.
Of course, Standard is hardly Panharmonicon’s bread and butter. That’s clearly EDH, where playing creatures without ETB effects is akin to not bolting the bird — it may be the correct play, but you better have a damn good reason for it. That constant pressure from the 100 card crowd is what has kept Panharmonicon where it is, so any meaningful Standard demand is going to build on an already strong base. It’s tough for Standard to pull $.50 rares up to $3, but pulling a $3 rare to $7 or $10 is way more feasible.
Add to all of this that Panharmonicon’s price on MTGO has more than doubled since Friday in response to it’s showing at the GP weekend. That doesn’t mean the card is due for a spike, of course, but it means players took notice quickly and are eager to play a strategy that A. isn’t GB, UW, or Aetherworks, and B. looks like an EDH deck in Standard.
Based on interviews and anecdotal evidence from the last few months it has become clear that Standard, the primary constructed format of our beloved Magic: The Gathering, is in a spot of trouble.
Reports from LGS operators have outlined a Standard landscape exhibiting clear signs of weakening participation. Whether this has roots in the decision last year (now reversed) to shorten the Standard rotation schedule from 24 months to 18 months (based on large fall set rotation as the anchor set), or the fact that Standard this fall has devolved to a binary star system where anyone not playing UW Flash or GB Delirium is probably doing it wrong (despite early results from RW Vehicles and resurgent online results from GR Aetherworks Marvel). WoTC has clearly taken notice and has expressed their concerns through the launching of various in store promotional efforts (so-called Treasure Chest packs and Buy a Box promotions) as well as the aforementioned reversal of the rotation schedule.
It is important to remember that the persistent perfection of the Standard metagame is a highly elusive and magical beast, and not one we can expect to be present at all times. The format has endured similarly poor environments before (including the Mono Blue vs Mono Black decks of Theros block), only to bounce back as the printing of new sets refreshed the meta and got people excited again.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that WoTC is leaving too many opportunities on the shelf. As one of the dual pillars, along with a fun draft format, of persistent in store participation and product purchase, a strong Standard represents strong game health. Sure, Modern and Legacy are solid scenes in many places, but those players have a reduced need for new cards, and often have collections deep enough that they can trade for anything new they might need. Hence, the reason that both tournament organizers and the company have pulled back from Legacy and may one day refresh the component sets of Modern to keep the purchasing cycle flowing.
Here are a few ideas that I think are worth exploring by WoTC as they contemplate the continued health of the game vis a vis a more exciting Standard paradigm:
DCI Player Rewards Program Redux
As a marketing professional, the current handling of the DCI program is a bit mystifying to me. Here we have a process that registers every participant in every sanctioned tournament both large and small, across the globe, and yet somehow Wizards hasn’t taken the obvious next step and turned our DCI numbers into a full fledged rewards and sales tracking program.
Why would this be of use? Well, for a number of reasons.
At present, the company is able to gather some very detailed information on participation levels at every participating LGS across the planet, and as such, can spot early trends in things like Standard participation levels by cross-referencing this against store and distributor level sealed product sales data to get a pretty good sense of what is happening in the community at the retail level.
What’s missing however is a greater sense of purpose and community and a more predictable measuring stick for brand loyalty and buying habits. In 2016 most gaming stores are using a digital inventory/accounting system to track sales but both the LGS owners and Wizards are missing out on the wealth of data that would come from connecting the specific sales data to the DCI number of each player.
Reasons abound to bring back an updated version of this program.
Specifically, I’m proposing that every time we purchase something at our LGS the sale is connected to our DCI account, providing a wealth of data on our purchasing and play habits that can be mined to better shape in store promotions, set designs and marketing efforts.
It’s one thing to know that Timmy played in pre-release tourneys twice this year, and drafts once a month. It’s quite another to know that his exact spend across two LGS locations is $1845.32 this year, that he tends to purchase 60% of his singles on Friday night after he gets paid, and that he stops drafting for a few weeks when his pockets get drained by supplemental product releases and that he showed up to twice as many FNM events during periods when the promo card was one of the top ten most purchased cards of the season. Training staff to ask a simple “what format are you buying that for” would generate a massive amount of good data.
Picture getting an email inviting you back to play Standard when the system detects you haven’t showed up for a few weeks, complete with a coupon for a product they know you like and a reminder that the cards you need for your Metalwork Colossus deck are back in stock and on sale. This is the kind of total player life-cycle management that is currently absent in the game.
Sharing some of this data with the LGS owners via a shared dashboard can only enrich their own ability to better manage all aspects of their Magic business, while providing a fresh layer of trust and transparency with HQ.
From the player perspective, we would trade a minor invasion of privacy for frequent player rewards in the form of coupons, discounts, free event entry and/or (better) promotional cards or other products. At Face to Face Games here in Toronto, we already make good use of a “buy 8 tourneys, get one free” style rewards card, but this kind of thing is just the tip of the iceberg versus what is possible when a program of this type is supported from the top and refined over time based on constant data gathering.
Standard Leagues
In the amateur sports and gaming world, it is entirely common to declare a league schedule and expect participants to block off every Tuesday at 7pm to participate in an ongoing series of events.
Pre-release tournaments, FNM (Friday Night Magic) and Game Day events are all expressions of the value of regularly scheduled and well understood models of participation, and the community building that takes place as a result of seeing the same familiar faces at your local store. That being said, we can push this concept farther.
I’d like to see Wizards go the extra mile and declare specific Standard leagues spanning the period from the release of one Standard legal set to the next, perhaps with a week break during spoiler season. Continued participation in these leagues, which would still be drop-in friendly, would reward consistency in both participation and results with promo cards, discounts, accessories, etc.
Picture a Standard League Super Pass, that includes the following for $199.99:
One booster box of Kaladesh w/ Buy-a-Box promo
One free Standard legal booster per week
One set of Kaladesh sleeves
One Kaladesh deck box
12 weeks of league play entry fees
A 5% in store discount on Standard legal cards during the league (so long as DCI # is associated with sale)
Now clearly, you can tweak the knobs on this machine in any number of different ways, but the core premise is to invite up front commitment from players in exchange for a clear value upgrade. The LGS gets to collect revenues up front and “lock in” participation for the season. They fund the in store discount on singles and most of the prize pool, and WoTC provides the kit for the rest. An optional Invitational style event based on results in the league can be run in the last week of the season, with additional prize support from the LGS/WoTC.
A different version for draft or sealed play should likely also be offered.
Players who want to jump in on the league can do so easily by paying the usual single tournament experience, but the benefits to buying in on the whole league and tying the whole experience together in an easy to understand package would help bridge the gap between FNM style casual nights and the hassle of RPTQ grinding. You can even take this a step further and look at providing PTQ invites to league winners.
Monthly Metagame Boosters
One of the issues with Standard is the possibility for the metagame to be solved early on in the sales cycle for a new set. If the players come to the conclusion that only a couple of decks are viable options, as is happening now and has happened in the past, it tends to dissuade the kind of week-to-week brewing that keeps local Standard tournaments and FNM nights fun and exciting.
The simply reality is that Magic is primarily a game of discovery and most players are much more attracted to unsolved and unfamiliar formats than solved formats. Take the temperature of a room at your local large site pre-release and compare it to a local Standard event during the last week of November 2016, and tell me you can’t feel the difference in the energy level?
One way to ensure that the metagame keeps evolving? Stop releasing sets all at once. Instead, supplement the main set release with periodic micro-set releases, called something like Power Boosters. This concept is likely to generate the most push back, and there are real reasons to doubt it, but hear me out.
These sets could be offered in a limited number of sub-themes such as Madness, Delirium or Vehicles. Marketing can tag them with sexy names like Rage of the Immortals, Rolling in the Deep or Driving the Revolt. If you’re already subscribed to the Fall Standard League Super Pass mentioned above, you get your choice of one of these micro-sets say six weeks after the main release.
(At first I thought a monthly release might be best, but upon further reflection a single burst between sets seems like the simplest and least expensive starting point to help the meta evolve without resetting the table too often.)
Did Olivia just need a few more cards to be viable?
How might this impact MTG Finance? Well, for one thing, an ever shifting meta-game makes it harder to sit on staples for profit, since they may not stay staples for as long. In this brave new world a card like Aetherflux Reservoir might be a better bet than pegging your hopes on Gideon, Ally of Zendikar making the move from $20 to $30.
On the other hand, most methods of distribution that leveraged “LGS only” would have the potential to send a card through the roof. To counter this potential, if you were already enrolled in the current Standard League via a super-pass, your choice of the four available Power Boosters would be included in your bundle fees at a discount. Otherwise, players could order additional Power Boosters direct from their LGS for as long as the root set was in Standard.
Each player can order up to X (say 4) of each of the themed micro-sets, and each set contains a full play set of the needed cards. If all of the cards contained within were rares and they were all included in equal numbers, and availability until their root set rotated, that might help counter any tendency for the most important cards to spike too high. Could one of these cards make it’s way into Modern or EDH and end up expensive? Certainly, but the fairly aggressive reprint policy we’re currently living through can help further mitigate that potential and give players a good reason to be playing and collecting via support of their local store.
So what’s the downside?
Well, just off the top we have the cost of producing, printing, distributing and promoting the extra cards. That being said, I suspect that many of these cards would normally get left on the cutting room floor during the trimming of the main set release, so the impact on design/development might not be quite so terrible. Those teams would however need to have a good sense of which themes would need the help via the Future Future League, and there’s always the possibility that they overestimate one theme and underestimate another, resulting in, for instance, an uber-powerful vehicles deck that nothing card stand against.
There is also the fact that this represents significantly more coordination between Organized Play and the store owners, as well as more program management cost. Whether all of that is worth it in the end is merely a guess until you button down the specifics of course, but if I was on the team I’d at least be looking at the option, especially as part of a more refined and powerful DCI Rewards program as described above.
You would also need to figure out how to handle some of the languages and regions that don’t normally get access to supplemental product, but I think the LGS based ordering system would alleviate most of the price and availability pressure while focusing constructed purchasing in on the LGS level.
Would it matter that Wal-Mart never got the Power Booster? I doubt it. The world of the player who never goes near an LGS is very different than the world of an active community member, and the rumor of extra cards available down the street at your local comic shop might be just what is needed to pull you into the fold.
Finally, there is the fact that many Standard seasons were just fine on their own. I played heavily between Khans of Tarkir and Magic: Origins for example, and I felt plenty motivated to show up the entire time. That being said, I’m willing to guess that sales typically slow 4-6 weeks after release for both WotC and the retailers, so a great reason to show up mid-season could be a solid sales booster.
So there you have it. What made sense to you here? What go you angry or excited? Do you have ideas of your own to share?
James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
